Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

An eviction is a landlord-initiated, involuntary move that expels individuals and families from their homes, and directed toward individuals renting or leasing a residence. Many groups are at greater risk of eviction than others, namely, individuals living in high-poverty black and Latino neighborhoods (Desmond, 2012a). Even when race has not been found to be a consistent predictor of evictions (Desmond & Gershenson, 2017), scholars have argued that racial/ethnic differences in eviction rates may be due to discriminatory practices and high levels of discretion by landlords.

One reason for greater discretion among landlords may be public policy. Specifically, legislation aimed at reducing the effects of eviction is often enacted at the state level, particularly legislation that addresses the relationship between landlords and tenants. Such policies address price and possession rules, health and safety requirements, and protections for tenants against landlord discrimination. Though research has examined the social and economic characteristics of displaced renters, to the authors’ knowledge, research may not fully examine the explicit role of public policy in disparate eviction rates.

Our research question is: To what extent do state policies reduce or exacerbate eviction rates in racial/ethnic minority neighborhoods? We hypothesize that because racial/ethnic minorities may be more likely to be evicted, states with landlord-friendly policies may be associated with higher eviction rates in neighborhoods with high minority populations. We examine the number and type of state laws that govern the relationship between landlords and renters by developing an index that extends the Hatch (2017) typology of landlord-tenant law. This typology identifies the clustering of policies in three areas: protectionist, contradictory, and probusiness, with the two former typologies associated with more frequent moves among its renting population at the state level.

Using block group-level data from Princeton University’s Eviction Lab, we investigate the relationship between rates of eviction, state policies, and social and economic factors over time. The sample is a panel dataset of 678,515 observations of 61,690 U.S. Census block groups over 11 years (from 2006 to 2016). The time frame accounts for evictions and related legislation enacted immediately before and as a result of the Great Recession. We utilize a factor analysis to typify landlord-tenant policies adopted at the state level over time, and include a lagged measure of the annual number of enacted state rental policies related to landlord-tenant relationships. The analysis will use a linear mixed-effects model to account for eviction rates, changes in state policies, and additional factors at state and neighborhood levels. The findings from this research may help clarify the extent to which the rental policy environment influences neighborhood trends in evictions, particularly those that may contribute to related disparate outcomes.